Random Promo Codes On Website

Hi,

I think I might know what you are referring to. If your web setup is anything similar to ours, it's likely that the price types (which I assume in the quoted text are referred to as 'offers') are by default available on the web and in order to block them from appearing, you need to add an offer and keep the dates consistent with the whole on-sale period. That way, the web API will hide the price types for the duration of the offer(s).

I find this happens fairly often, as the promo price types work on an 'exclusion' basis, rather than 'inclusion' basis, so they need to be specifically 'removed' by adding an offer that hides them (paradoxically!).

Hope this helps,

Mike

Matt,

I expect the the key problem you're having is the one Michal refers to when he says "whole on-sale period".  Price types are _only_ blocked if there is a _current_ Offer on them.  If, like us, you run a generic three week sale over most of your inventory, then at the end of the Offer period, your sale price will (and I find this very unintuitive and unhelpful) suddenly be available to everyone.

I solved this be creating what I call the "Generic Offer Block": a Source that isn't available by promo code.  We create an offer on this source for such shows (where our offer might end while the show is still on sale, or where an offer won't start until some time in the future) with dates to the end of our fiscal year, and this guarantees that the price type will be unavailable to everyone except people who have access to the proper sale offer.

The other thing to watch out for, though, is MOS: if you have multiple Web MOS then you need to make sure that all of them are controlled by Offers.

--Gawain

That is exactly what I was going to add :)

One way around using an exclusion offer is to set the active dates on the real offer to the entire run but just inactivate the source tied to the offer when that promotion is no longer valid.  That way the price type is still locked, but when someone tries to use the source that would unlock it they will receive a promo code not valid error (though the exact message of the error will depend on how your site is coded).

And to give credit where credit is due, they guys at Alley Theatre helped brainstorm this idea as we were doing some training on offers and they asked about this forum thread.

I'll also be clarifying the documentation on offers, which is currently vague on how the offer active dates function.

-Kevin

Hi Kevin,

One thing we looked into was using Source Code Start/End dates, (rather than manual activation/inactivation), but since we only have date resolution on those, rather than hour, we couldn't use them for our particular purposes.

--Gawain

Hi Kevin,

One thing we looked into was using Source Code Start/End dates, (rather than manual activation/inactivation), but since we only have date resolution on those, rather than hour, we couldn't use them for our particular purposes.

--Gawain